Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @06:31PM
from the i-blame-the-schools dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Discovery News reports that the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica. It is spreading along the East and West Coasts of the U.S. and appears to be moving south into Mexico. 'When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won't experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours,' says Cat Adams. 'Eventually she'll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase.' Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. 'When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,' says Adams. Still, Mitchell cautions against the 'regular look"'of deadly mushrooms. 'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"

An interesting evolutionary point, did the death cap evolve as toxic because it was so tasty, that only the toxic variety survived as the rest where eaten. In commercial terms would the death cap be an ideal mushroom to grow and selectively breed to eliminate the toxicity, being one of the tastiest varieties.

Is this hype because it is finding its way into the food supply in stores either via getting into commercial operations accidentally or being picked and sold as something else by wild collectors, or is it just journalistic pomp? Because, as somebody who regularly photographs fungi while out photographing native orchids, I'm willing to bet only a very small percentage of the population would ever even consider eating a wild mushroom. Even 90+ percent of my hiking buddies, all of them reasonably good at plant and fungus IDs, would never consider taking that risk unless it was something very expensive to just buy, like morels.

My in-laws from China are always wanting to pick mushrooms out of the yard to eat. It's amazing what living through the Cultural Revolution will do to make you save every penny and eat anything you can find not nailed down.

True. I have a Chinese friend whose parents collect napkins. Thousands and thousands of napkins. They are also of that age group. I suspect they fear running out of napkins. Many of my older Polish family members, especially those born in Poland between say, 1938-1989, displayed similar behavior...presumably for similar albeit somewhat less severe reasons.

Even better. My wife 30 years of age, is the child of parents that grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Even she collects shit like plastic utensils from fast food joints and whatnot. Plastic bag, bottles, containers, etc. What I call "trash" she calls useful. While it is nice to save money and protect the environment, sometimes she goes too far. And no, it's not a hoarding disorder, but it's damn near close with a cause.

My in-laws from China are always wanting to pick mushrooms out of the yard to eat. It's amazing what living through the Cultural Revolution will do to make you save every penny and eat anything you can find not nailed down.

Oh great, so we have that to look forward to, as our very own cultural revolution proceeds...

It isn't necessarily about frugality. There are many easily identified mushrooms that can grow in your yard that are quite delicious. Shaggy manes, oyster mushrooms, various boletes, morels, and chanterelles are all delicious mushrooms I've found in yards and eaten. If you're so inclined, you can easily grow your own [fieldforest.net].

I should clarify...I mean in most of North America. Granted, certain immigrant groups may display a greater predilection for mushroom collecting, and I know it is a bigger deal in the Pacific Northwest of the US along with in Europe, but still, in NA it isn't a HUGE pastime.

I think the issue is that though they are relatively easy to ID, they are new to the continental US and can be easily mistaken for the Straw Mushroom, which *is* edible, so people assuming this mushroom still only grows in Europe may be in for quite a nasty surprise.

Which makes sense from the standpoint of say, a website catering to those who pick mushrooms, but Slashdot? Plus, the whole thing is so full of hype that you'd think the mushrooms are throwing themselves into mouths.

I'm a Finn and most people I know pick mushrooms during the summer and fall to eat. It's very common around here. Granted, we only pick things that we know to be safe. I guess one reason is that it's very common to hike around the forests and pick berries and mushrooms here due to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

I actually know of only one case in my (not immediate) family that has been poisoned by mushrooms. This was because of a French friend who was visiting in Finland and was living at one o

It's just that so many Americans are so detached from nature and are afraid of that "you're standing on my property!" and getting peppered by bullets, that they don't enjoy nature...

Come on, that's not at all true. Visits to national parks in the U.S. are at all time highs, as are regional parks or just any park/forest - there is a TON of open land people can and do go exploring on all across the whole of the U.S. If you have never been I don't think you understand how much open areas there are even close

If the people who ate them " described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'" have all survived once they took the antidote, would other people consider eating this mushroom KNOWING that they were putting their life at risk (assuming they had access to the antidote)?

I mean is this akin to eating the "Fugu" fish (which I have!) where, for some, part of the attraction of the food is the possibility that you might die?

Are there other foods which are (potentially?) dangerous or deadly but are so tasty that it is worth the risk?

Are there other foods which are (potentially?) dangerous or deadly but are so tasty that it is worth the risk?

It isn't worth the risk. Death caps inhibit a crucial part of cell metabolism, RNA transcription. It's interesting that they don't kill themselves. People usually die of liver failure since that's where the poison ends up (the diarrhea is of course also a sign of a large number of cell deaths, but those cells are more expendable).

Nicely tasting, absolutely deadly poisonous mushrooms with wide specificity but a large time-delay (about a week). Good for wiping out major parts of a herd. My guess is that it's due to their symbiosis with hardwood trees: gives some protection to those slow-growing trees from getting stripped of their bark by deer and other planteaters.

A single mushroom is enough to kill a person. Even with "antidote", you will do more damage to your liver and other organs than 20 years of heavy drinking.

You cannot compare this to Fugu since properly prepared, the meat of the fish will not cause any damage.

I read a story about a man who ate death caps and survived. He said they were unexpectedly bland. Fugu is pretty bland, too, and expensive. I went to the cheapest place I could find, $45 per person...which of course means they had the least-skilled chef there. Eek.

Then I read the article, and the article sounded like the mushrooms weren't super delicious, but rather the chef who prepared it was very good at preparing food. Further, it read like a eulogy, where you only say good things about the recently deceased. Even when they died from picking their own mushrooms.

So I'm not sure there is widespread agreement that the mushrooms are so delicious.

It's not like picking mushrooms is a cost-efficient way to get free food. Mushrooms have few calories, you probably spend more searching for them than you actually acquire. It's that they taste better than mushrooms you get at the store, they're fresher, there's varieties you can't normally buy, and it's kind of a fun activity when you're hiking. In Europe and Japan and many other nations, hunting for mushrooms is fairly common.

Only a very small amount of fungi is poisonous, as long as you know what you'

The Death Cap is something I learned as a child not to touch, and I teach my kids that too. It's pretty common where I live to learn which things in nature are edible and what to watch out for. I had the impression most people around the world had that kind of education "built in". Is that not the case in the US these days?

When I was on the East coast of the US, people were screaming at their kids not to go near any kind of green thing: "Stop, there's poison ivy there. And rabid raccoons. And Ebola." Yes, even in their own backyards. Not even exaggerating much.

The main reason these mushrooms are eaten is that they are misidentified as some similar looking edible species. The most frequent victims for these mushrooms are immigrants that mistake them for an edible species that they would find back where they were originally from. In the US on the west coast, that most often means immigrants from eastern Asia mistaking them for Volvariella, volavacea, commonly sold in supermarkets in cans as "Paddy Straw Mushrooms".

As far as being deadly, their lethality depends mostly on how much of them you eat. In a very general sense, if you eat some and don't seek medical treatment, your odds of dying are around 50%. With treatment (before the milk thistle extract), the survival rate was more like 90%.

There are lots of other mushrooms that also produce the same toxins in potentially deadly quantities. The ones that produce the most poisonings are Galerinas (especially G. marginata), since they resemble some of the hallucinogenic species of Psilocybe and can grow in the same habitats, at the same time, and even side by side with them. Lepiotas and Conocybes (Pholiotinas) can also be deadly in the same way, but don't generally resemble other mushrooms that most would want to eat.

There are lots of safe mushrooms and groups of mushrooms that are easy to identify accurately enough to eat without significant risk. Members of the genus Amanita (the ones these deadly ones belong to) don't fall into that category, unless you're a real expert. A lot of the "experts" that are referred to as such are people that can identify a few species (or maybe a few dozen species) in the woods - not somebody we should treat as a real expert. It's a bit like calling somebody who has done a "Hello World" program in a couple languages a programming expert.

If you want to learn enough to forage for your own wild mushrooms, you should contact a local mycological society. You can meet people who can show you how to identify some of the easier, safer mushrooms in your area.

Yeah, I'd add to be careful of online forums for mushroom identification. I use them but I've noticed that sometimes you get 2-3 posts confirming your identification, and then the next day a more knowledgeable guy rips them apart with the correct one. If you've eaten them in the meanwhile...

Death cap is a common mushroom in our region (western part of Russia and Baltics). You can find it easily in every forest but amounts vary by year. Despite the fact it is well known to any interested person, there are a few lethal cases every summer involving careless mushroom pickers. A cultural note: wild mushroom picking is considered normal everyday activity here, regardless your income and social status.

Yes, men do not fall for the trap. Women see it and start thinking of all the ways they can cook it in the kitchen. Women are obsessed with kitchens and all things food, look at Eve.

Men had it made, perfection, immortality, perfect body, great lawn, we could fart and scratch our balls on silky smooth perfect grass in Eden. But Eve comes along her "kitchen obsession" kicks in and she starts bringing back foods to feed Adam, fattening him up, she breaks the rules and Adam has to suffer consequences along side the woman.

I wouldn't be surprised if many many cavemen died, they returned home with fresh Sabertooth tiger meat, but the woman had tried foraging picking plants "as they do" and feeds caveman poison ivy/oak/sumac and wipes out all Neanderthals!

No, they opted to use the pronoun that best describes your average, typical human on Earth.

Nope, 100% wrong.English rules in all English-speaking countries default to the male pronoun when gender is general or unknown. Use of the female pronoun is ONLY in cases where you are only referring to females.Any person using the female pronoun by default is simply trying to push some kind of agenda.

It's not an English rule, it's a rule valid in most, if not all Indo-European languages that haven't gone through a full shift from the original tri-gendered PIE system to something without the M/F distinction. Languages like Russian, Slovak, and Czech still keep the original three genders (well, four, if you count the animate/inanimate opposition in masculine as two genders, as many linguists do), and since the M/F distinction is still present in them, M gender is used in indefinite and interrogative sente

This is not so. By default each human cell is a male cell. Female cells have to be constantly refreshed into being female through hormone release.

The way it works is that when you are born male you have something called SRY and it increases SOX9 [wikipedia.org] and decreases FOXL2 [wikipedia.org] which is the "opposite" part of a cell that determines which gender it is. For females it is the otherway around. However, if a female does not suppress SOX9 they will develop male characteristics (this is why you can get an XX male [wikipedia.org]). The cells default option is to move back toward "maleness" and this is why after menopause women and men aren't really that different (because at a cellular level they are tending towards the same gender expressions).

So we have grammar books, but grammar books are just "motivated opinion pieces" written by people, and most of them are conservative white men.

First of all, all modern grammar books and descriptive in nature. That means that they *describe* how the language is being used. You may call that "conservative" but that's just linguistics to you and me - it's a descriptive science. As far as "white" is concerned - well, guess what - Indo-European languages are spoken by white folks, since they came up with that whole thing! (An exception being immigrants, of course.) And as to the "men" part, some of the best grammarians I know happen to be female, and t

That reminds me of the old Borscht Belt joke about the guy who's filling out his social security application and they ask him if he's ever been married.

He says, "Yes, I was married to first wife for a wonderful 15 years, but tragically she died from eating poison mushrooms. Then, I remarried and my second wife, after eight glorious years died, believe it or not, also from eating poison mushrooms.

"Then, I married my third wife, and we were together for four years, when she died from a cerebral hemorrhage...

We've got the problem in California that there are lots of people who've come from places where mushroom hunting is a common occupation, and where there are local tasty mushrooms back in the old country which look a lot like our poisonous ones. And it's often not just one victim, it's a whole family who've been out in the woods for the day, picked the mushrooms, and cooked them for dinner. And now they all need liver transplants.

Hm. But Death Cap is very common in Europe (where it is native), in Asia and in Northern Africa. Wherever you find oaks, you find the Death Cap. Often it gets to their new place with oaks that are grown in Europe (or a place where the Death Cap grows already) and then transported somewhere else to be planted in parks and gardens.

And yes, in Europe, there are also mushrooms that look quite similar to the Death Cap, but are edible, like the Blusher or Saffron Ringless Amanita. So people coming from Europe to California to go mushroom hunting and are messing up a Death Cap with a Blusher would have made the same mistake in Europe.

To be fair, the story did note that, "the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica," and the last link was to an incident in Australia. So it could be coming soon to a table near you... unless you are in Antarctica.

No one said that "furriners" sic had to leave. They should just not be any more shocked that a US based website is going to be heavy on US centric news. It would be as silly as if I complained that BBC is too UK centric.

Every tech site is going to be US news heavy for the simple reason that Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, AMD, Cisco, and so on are all US based companies. CNN has an International version btw just as the BBC does. I will agree with you that the BBC is a great news service. As a Canadian all I can say is you guys suck. You should have made more episodes of Little Mosque, but you should have kept Reverand McGee and not had Yasar and Sarah divorce.

No, Simple reason is Google, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Oracle, Amazon, the FSF, IBM, and NASA. Not to mention Slashdot is a US based website, in english, and owned by a US based company. Your complaint is as dumb as if I went to France and complained about the lack of TV shows in english.

Are there any tech sites athat aren't so USA focused? Slashdot has become really dull lately.

Could it be because its an invasive species there, and anyone in Europe taken into the woods by their parents as a kid will have been warned of the death cap mushroom, along with belladonna, cuckoo pint, and so on?

"should have mentioned I mean they are easy to ID and eating unidentified fungi has always been stupid thing to do"

"Easy to ID" is a relative term. Even experts get some fungi wrong. For example, there are poisonous species of Galerina that sometimes grow right alongside the prized hallucinogenic "Liberty Cap" mushrooms, and even experts have to take a spore print and use a microscope to tell them apart.

As a PSA, here are two warning signs displayed by A Phalloides as in that picture on Wikipedia:

First is the "veil" surrounding the stem just below the cap, which you can see on the larger mushroom that is setting on its side. The other is the "cup" at the bottom.

It is important to note that neither of these are reliable indicators. Some edible species of mushrooms have one or both. Many poisonous species of mushrooms do not.

The point is: unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, treat those features as strong warning signs. Best not to eat any mushrooms that have them.

Indicators and rules of thumb are a good start. However these are also very regional. There were cases of Russians who moved to north america and are mushrooms that would be safe back in Russia (based on guides such as A+B implies safe to eat).

As noted, to be safe you really want a definitive identification. In extreme cases this requires a spore print and microscope. On the other side, in many cases you narrow it down to either a good mushroom, or one that gives some people indigestion but that's it, and

Since we're talking rules of thumb here: in North America, all native berries with a blue or purple color are edible. (But not necessarily ornamental or garden plants; you don't know where they're from.)

Red berries: some are edible, some are not. Be familiar with those that are.

White berries: pretty much inedible. Many are poisonous, none are very nutritious. There are stories of people surviving for a time on snowberries, but... they're stories.

which is my point exactly, unless you KNOW for certain what it is you don't eat it. Like I say I spent my youth cataloging stuff like that including spore prints and so on and used to carry my guides while hiking and then my adulthood photographing them. Even after surefire ID and so on I'd never considered eating stuff that has very similar looking but highly poisonous ones I could mistake them for. Just isn't worth the chance. I have eaten fly agaric but that was prepping properly and flavour isn't great

A mushroom expert I used warned against picking any small brown mushrooms, because there are so many and they can be so hard to tell apart. They're more trouble than they're worth - although maybe the risk/benefit ration looks different for shroomers.

In US, pharmacies carry milk thistle capsule bottles. I know this because back in 2010 I was concerned that some of the Agaricus I have harvested was not Agaricus... Wikipedia mentioned the milk thistle, the ER doctor know about it too (and still gave me the active charcoal regimen, ewww) - it's obvious that this was common knowledge at the time.

This study must have lasted a long time. There are only a few poisonings every year around these parts (Santa Cruz mountains, the Peninsula), to gather 60+ patients